Please Help our Resto Druid

Our druid is usually lagging behind our other healers. She doesnt want to play boomkin, and really on certain fights shes of little use because they can be 2 healed with the other 2 healers. But she doesnt like to play boomkin.

And tips would be appreciated and passed on.. I haven't played my druid in quite a while so I have tryed to help her out the best I can but would appreciate help from druid experts. I would like to get in a situation where it is viable to 2 heal with the resto druid and the paladin on fights that dont require 3 heals.

Harmony ( our mastery ) uptime was only 60%! Considering it lasts 20 seconds and swiftmend is only a 15 second cooldown... you should have 100% up time. This is also not including clearcasting procs, of which she had 26. She also did not use tree of life once. She also only cast tranquility once. This fight is 10 minutes, and you can use these spells up to 3 times, and each of these are very important in druid throughput.

The largest problem I see is that she is not using her clearcasting procs at all. These procs are used by casting regrowth or healing touch. She used neither of these spells. You usually are supposed to use them on regrowth, since healing touch takes a year to cast and regrowth has a pretty solid chance of giving you a living seed due to the high crit chance on it. This is a huge chunk of healing that she is missing out on. She used nourish 19 times. I don't think I've used nourish in a raid once. The healing done is almost nothing, and that time is better spent sitting there or casting a rejuv. there really is no need to cast nourish like there was in DS, where we needed to direct cast every 10 seconds (since swiftmend is 15 sec) to keep up our mastery. this is no longer the case and it is probably not useful to cast.

She cast swiftmend 10 times. as said before, it's a 15 second cooldown. the fight is 600 seconds long. 600/15 = 40. She could have cast 40 swiftmends. Ideally you would cast at least 35 times (due to movement, holding it for procs etc)

There are few other things missing, but I would mostly just point her to the resto druid guide here on mmo, have her read through it, and perhaps glance through some of the resto druid question threads on the first page. These will help her gear properly for spirit, haste caps, and which spells to use, when, and why. The issue is that she doesn't know any of these unfortunately.

Originally Posted by Socialhealer

judging 25man raiding by LFR standards saying it requires no coordination, is like saying 5mans require cheese sandwiches because i like turtles.

then learn how Harmony works and how to precast it before pull (and learn to keep it up as close to 100% as she can)

learn to have 3x lifebloom running all the time(after Harmony are up) on the tank with argo, swap then argo change
at the same time, learn to have min 2x rejuv running all time(look out rejuv drain mana) one on tank/melee group one on her self/range group, so she have a target to cast swiftmend on if tank/melee get dmg or her self/range
and use wild growth on every CD.

soo basis healing recap
keep
3x lb running
2x rejuv running
swiftmend every CD cd
WG every CD
use innervad around 70% mana and again then is is ready
fix a deal then to use raid healing CD tranquility, lets say she use her on the first "Force and Verve" then he is on the platform, and again then he is on the main floor then is it ready.

this will raise her healing a bit, then she is familiar with basis

she can start to focus cast regrowth on clearcast, and use all the other CD/tools resto druid have.

a good idea is healer addon vuhdoo(all most out the box then installed) and weak auras google after WA resto setup.

I can't link my WoL as this is my first post and the forums won't let me. But search for Forleyn of Good Fortune - EU SteamWheedle Cartel. We did Zor'Lok the other night, and at a quick glance, my logs look fairly consistent with how I feel a druid should be healing. Disregard my relatively high regrowth count though, my regen is very very high and I can afford to do this nowadays. Your druid may not just yet.

One of the things I noticed, as did others, is that regrowth/healing touch is practically non-existent. Regrowth should be used every single clearcasting proc, HT in some situations, but 99% regrowth. Not using these is a huge waste of healing done and mana, as they are free heals.

Also, I noticed they used tree of life only once in the entire raid. Why is this? It's only a 3 minute cooldown. I tend to use mine once or twice a fight. It's effectively another CD aside from tranq, therefore giving a huge healing CD every 1.5 minutes.

I saw someone mentioned askmrrobot. This is all well and good (I often look at it myself but form my own opinion, often agreeing with mrrobot), but you must understand why you stat for certain things. For instance, the gear they are currently in on the armoury shows 3500 haste. This may be skewed if there are balance pieces in there, but going for any higher than 3034 (i may be slightly off there) is a complete waste of stats. Why? Because that is the breakpoint for some of the major HoTs, and the next significant increase isn't until almost double that amount of haste.

Now, for that particular fight, your druid will benefit massively if you get the force and verve stage first. They can pop tranq on the first one, and it should be ready to use again when you get to last 40%. chuck in incarnation:tree of life on one of the other stages as well (I find the MC phase to be a good time, esp if our rogue starts hacking people's faces in :P) and you will have that usable again in the last phase.

Thanks for the tips about regrowth/clear casting and Harmony uptimes. I will pass them along. I've been harping on her to pop tree form on cooldown when the situation calls for it. (Force and Verve etc). She just doesnt seem to understand you can use cooldowns more than once a fight. Shes got at not dieing to random bullshit so want to keep her and help her get better.

Thanks for the tips about regrowth/clear casting and Harmony uptimes. I will pass them along. I've been harping on her to pop tree form on cooldown when the situation calls for it. (Force and Verve etc). She just doesnt seem to understand you can use cooldowns more than once a fight. Shes got at not dieing to random bullshit so want to keep her and help her get better.

To be fair a druid is probably the worst healer for this fight. Personally this would be my actions on my druid (for normal mode):

Use Tranquility, Tree Form, and possibly Nature's Vigil on Force and Verves (Depends on if you get 2 or 3 on the first platform. If your DPS is good, you'll only get 1). On attenuation platform, just put rejuv up during dances and heal the tank (people should not be dying to this dance). On convert, be sure to use any CC's before the converts go out (I would just leave the CC talent row blank, even snares are deadly in phase 2). As resto, you should not have any CC's besides roots/cyclone (which are, obviously, cast-time). When convert is out be more aggressive on healing the tank (both boss and exhale tank) since they run a risk of being gibbed due to the MC's - use regrowth (which you should be doing anyway) and keep rejuv/LB up at all times.

* oh yeah, and also she should pre-place shrooms for force and verve. again druids are the worst healers for this but every little bit helps.

Phase 2 is like Phase 1, dance well, use your run speed to your advantage for force and verve bubbles, and use tranquility, tree, and nature's vigil as needed. Tranq will be your strongest cooldown (meaning other healers don't need to pop as many CD's), tree will be a medium cooldown (use with another healer's big CD).

If you need that cooldown for a force and verve get nature's vigil, otherwise just get HotW for the static gain.

Also she needs to use innervate more, because she didn't use it at all in that 10 minute attempt. That 300k mana and innervate CD is there for a reason, and it's not so you can sit on the mana!

p.s. personally I think NS is a better talent than cenarion ward, which she barely used in your logs. it can really save the tank's life on the convert platform, or a raid member's life on a dance. at worst, it's a free HT every minute, which will help with mana problems.

armory audit says she can use a bracer, glove, and boot enchant. also I'd recommend Jade Spirit over Windsong (it is infinitely better) but even if you don't want to use 10 sha crystals on blues, she can still use a free (LW) bracer chant and cheap glove/boot ones.

Direct her to the tools people have provided in the thread or get her to play a dps spec (boom is ideal since some of the gear can be shared but feral from my understanding is the top druid dps spec). If she still refuses to do these things, drop her from the raid and recruit a new hybrid. I would say shadow/disc to complement your paladin but you already have 2 priests (lowish dps, maybe make one of them disc). and 3 monks.

Yeah our Raid Comp is far from ideal, one of the priests is switching to mage. The MW monk is a sub, he comes sometimes. But the druid is just not good at dpsing. I will talk to her about her cooldown usage, and see if we can get her withing 5% or something of the other healers.

In addition to everything that's been said already, you should ask that she switch her bind for nourish to regrowth. Tell her to remove nourish from her brain altogether. Replace that Rejuv glyph with something else, anything. See how she likes the regrowth glyph.

Lifebloom uptime should be much higher than 75% (I only looked at your best attempt).

Tell her to check out weak auras. Even if she doesn't want to create her own, she can always google "resto druid weak auras".

To be honest, it doesn't look like she has done much research on the resto spec. If she refuses to play an off-spec for 2-heal fights, then it's only fair that she puts in the time to improve her performance in her main spec. Good luck!

Yeah our Raid Comp is far from ideal, one of the priests is switching to mage. The MW monk is a sub, he comes sometimes. But the druid is just not good at dpsing. I will talk to her about her cooldown usage, and see if we can get her withing 5% or something of the other healers.

Not going to happen with a holy paladin in the group for most fights. A better comparison is to look at the 200th or so resto druid on WoL for a particular fight, as you're more likely to find a resto druid in a 3 healer 10 man there.

From Armory:
-She needs to reforge down to 3043 Haste rating. 3500 is way too high. Even with current stat allotments, you should be able to get within 150 rating of a breakpoint.
-The gems are bad. Gemming should be for either Int or mastery, depending on what sims out to be better for you (use something like Treecalcs to find out). If you don't want to do that, then just play it safe and gem for int. Haste+Spirit gems are bad. The meta should be Int+3%crit-effect. Use either all Int or all Mastery gems. You can go for sockets if you want, but use gems that at least have one of those two stats in them.
-She can probably shave some Spirit off for more Mastery. I heal hard modes with 7400. You shouldn't need more than 8k in most circumstances.
-Rejuv Glyph is really not optimal. Most run Regrowth glyph, and there's really no reason not to.
-She should be running the 15% passive move speed increase talent in the first tier (Feline Grace, I think). There are very few circumstances where you use a different talent there. There are no such circumstances in any Normal modes this tier.
-Why does she not have the LW wrist enchant? Missing 500 Int is bad.
-Ugh...again...the gems are hurting my head. Just tell her to put solid int gems into everything and she'll be better off than she is now.

From WoL:
I'm looking at your 9:03 pull
-51.1% Harmony uptime. That's terrible. If it's below 90%, you're being bad.
-83.1% Lifebloom uptime isn't bad. It should still be above 90%, though.
-I don't understand her spell usage. She uses effectively zero direct heals, doesn't have a single Tranq used on a nine minute pull, and seems to sit there spamming Rejuv the entire time?
Now looking at your 9:08 pull
-71% Lifebloom uptime. She needs to be consistently higher with this.
-Again 51% Harmony uptime. This can't happen. She's killing her healing throughput by more than 15% every time Harmony falls off.
-I don't understand how you can get through a fight with zero HTs cast, even Zorlok. I know he hits like a pansy, but even if just to use Clearcast procs, she needs to be throwing out HTs and Regrowths (preferably glyphed). That's a waste of potentially thousands of MP5.
-Tell her to Swiftmend more. With all the Rejuvs she's throwing out (since it's basically the only spell she's using), she could probably get higher uptime on Harmony just by Swiftmending -_-

Her active time is probably low as well. If she's got nothing else to do, she should just be throwing out occasional Nourishes on the tank to keep Lifebloom and Harmony up.

She needs to use Tranq...Force and Verve is an excellent place to use it, and if you're getting nine minute pulls, you can use it at least twice on the platform and on the last phase.

And I see no Innervates used at all on any of the parses I've seen...is she just not casting enough where she doesn't need it? If so, then she needs to burn through more mana. You should be able to plan mana usage throughout the fight and figure out exactly when you want to burn your first Innervate, then pop it on cooldown after that (usually). You should have rough goals as to where your mana bar will be at any given point in whatever fight. As long as your raid isn't standing in things, encounter damage is predictable enough to do that. The goal is to end a fight with zero mana. If you have more than zero mana, that's wasted healing you didn't get to use in the fight before. You don't want to be OOM before a fight ends, but you want to get as close to it as possible.

As a raid you guys should plan cooldowns together with everyone who has one to contribute. Figure out EXACTLY when you're going to use every one, then make sure everyone uses it at that assigned time. At the very least, healers should be planning their own cooldowns around every fight.

In my honest opinion she is using the nourish out of fear of running out of mana. While being aware of her mana is a great thing, being to worried about it will lead to nourish fillers without ever touching regrowth, which should be used every cc proc and even on some without cc proc. Other prob I see in cen ward, she has the talent, but hardly ever uses it. Yes it's 30 sec cd and doesnt heal THAT much, but u better believe everytime mine is off cd I put it up on the tank. Also her glyphs, the nourish cast time reduce for the 3 rejuv needs to be replaced and if you are doing 10 mans which is what the log says. The wild growth glyph is a bit of a waste. It's much better for 25 mans. Also with our green circle of healing that comes from swiftmend, druids have to be careful with it. We can't place it like healing rain. We have to be careful to not proc it on someone standing alone in the corner. If it is a hectic fight and one that I can stand behind the boss with melee from time to time. I will cast it on myself and proc the swiftmend perfectly where I want it to max sure it gets max use. As far as gemming goes I gem spirit>haste till my break cap>intellect. Hope this helps.

People say I use this and I use that. Or for example pure int gems, well pure int gems are a good choice when you are 20 item levels ahead of the druid mentioned.
As for spirit, the only thing I would say is that it depends, it depends on the group and how they avoid damage, how high is the dps to shorten the fights and how aggressive are the other healers in the group and what class are they is important too. Something that works for you can't be applied to others and other groups.

But the advises are correct, faster reaction/anticipation of damage, watch for harmony, lifebloom, swiftmend and wildgrowth on cd when there is damage.
I would say to change her play style a bit, get weak auras or power auras or tellmewhen to track harmony, clearcasting, innervate cooldown (good to pop up an aura when her mana is less than 75-80% and innervate is available). Many pages offer ready sets to track procs with these addons.

Also I would suggest to get nature's swiftness and macro it with healing touch, makes for an excellent oh shit button, an aura for when NS is ready is handy too so she can use it on cd.

If she doesn't pay attention to the spells at the bars then an aura for when swiftmend and wild growth are ready can help with that.
The regrowth glyph is infinite times better than rejuvenation in my opinion, at least with the current crit % we run. All clearcasting procs should be used on regrowth the living seed that procs isn't bad either.

For gems I suggest to get to the point where she feels comfortable with spirit and then drop it in favor or int and mastery as she gets better gear and the group as a whole improves, the set bonuses are a lot of mp5.

Of course no spirit food/flask, only int. For gems is another story, the gem budget is double int/spirit, int/mastery, spirit/mastery or even a pure spirit gem could be used. In worst case a spirit/haste too if she needs to reach a break point (3043 haste). Generally something around 8k-8,5k spirit should be more than fine, especially with mana tide and good co-healers in group.

The only other thing she has to teach herself is to regularly use her cooldowns, not waste them in overhealing but not sit on them either, there are always phases that can be used.

askmrrobot.com is not as bad as people say, it can help someone that doesn't know and it will give them a place to start. For the rest the only useful thing is to look at your raid buffed stats.

Let me ask something else. While the advice above is all good (and reminds me, as I get back into raid healing, of some things I need to do), I wonder if there's something else going on. Are your other two healers simply not leaving a lot for her to heal, so that she's perhaps unsure of what to do and not seeing a real need to go all out?

I was in the last half of HOF LFR last night and there were, of course, 6 healers. Of these one was a highly geared priest, and three others were geared healers - a shammy, monk and another priest. WHile there were some portions of the fights that meant all of us had to heal a lot, there were also significant times when only the tanks and a couple of other people were taking any damage and there were more times when a few more people took damage.... but it was only 5 or 6 more people. Those times didn't really require much healing and slapping rejuv on people down 10% was sniped by Flash heals and the like. I focused on the tanks and usually tossed a rejuv/swiftmend on melee to cover them (lots of melee) but while I healed enough to need Innervate etc I wasn't stressing about whether we'd die.

My point is that if you really only need 2 healers given how good the shammy and pally are, maybe the druid is being lax partly out of not knowing raid healing that well but also because she's not having to heal a lot. I mean, you're not really going to pop CDs if you see widespread damage but it's healed right up nor are you going to worry as much about Harmony, etc. Tt could that she's saying to herself "I dunno, I can rejuv, lifebloom and do a few other things and it works..." I know that I have to re-learn some thing and break bad habit simply because I've been healing 5 mans and not only are the mechanics different, I outgear them so much that I can be lax. It's mostly Rejuv, LB, Swiftmend, /dance in there. Not in a raid.

On the other hand, if you're dying because of poor healing then none of the above applies - but given your statement that you don't really need a 3rd healer, I assume the wipes were due to other things.

[QUOTE=Playintrafic;19400991]No one gems solid int these days. All of your other advice seems very good.

Im playing the HPally in these logs and I have about 10.5k spirit. I was actually thinking she needed to gem for more spirit if shes having mana issues.

Talked to her about the clear casting procs she thought it was for all her healing spells not just the non instant ones. it seems she was also waiting until oom to use innervate. No idea why.[COLOR="red"]
Why ask for advice, then dismiss it?

Even at 2:1, Int outperforms Crit and Haste for gemming. You have to sim for Mastery vs Int since Mastery is an additive throughput buff. At different spell power levels, Int and Mastery will overtake each other.

And bonuses are terrible. Int bonuses are fine, but Crit, Haste, Mastery, and even Spirit bonuses are all crap. Int beats Haste and Crit bonuses handily, and I've yet to see a Mastery bonus worth taking. And why lose throughput to go for a Spirit bonus when you don't need more than ~7.5k in the first place?

Druids don't go for Spirit. I know Pallies and Shaman go for as much Spirit as they possibly can, and run in excess of 10k. Druids stop before they hit 8k. It's just not needed with intelligent play. 480 Spirit rating allows you to cast eight extra Rejuvs in a six minute fight. 480 Mastery increase your throughput in total by roughly 1%.